Whiff of a Mystery Lingers as a Restaurant Recovers From Flames

By MICHAEL BRICK

Published: July 18, 2004

Standards and bunting of dark green and gold fly above the wooden slats of the old, old boardwalk, where ocean winds come fast ashore and gulls flutter effortfully. By day, these fresh decorations shade sunbathers. By night, they beckon restless others to come see acrobatic dancers shaking in bright, sinister masquerade.

Summertime smiles on the spectacle that is Tatiana Restaurant and Nightclub, a centerpiece of the seaside haven of Brighton Beach. But this summer a mystery lingers here, and the new banners are the best reminders.

On a Wednesday night last September, as the late-night bunch finished one of summer's last meals, flames climbed through the slats in the boardwalk, blackening the wood, melting the glass facade and trapping people in a private dining room. The fire spread 120 feet wide and 100 feet high, and gutted five stories of apartments above.

Firefighters from Battalion 43 and Ladder Company 172 executed a daring rescue, and the human damage was limited to 20 minor injuries, but Tatiana's patio was a twisted and charred landscape, and its dining room was soaked and ruined.

The authorities said from the start that the fire was suspicious. A second alarm was called one minute after firefighters first arrived, an indication that the flames had burned with extraordinary intensity. Battalion Chief Steven Bernius spent a good part of the next morning examining a charred propane space heater, and people in the neighborhood quickly voiced sinister theories.

There was talk of jealousy of the success of the restaurant's namesake, Tatiana Varzar, a Russian immigrant who moved to Brighton Beach in the 1970's and opened her restaurant in 1989. And there was gossip about Ms. Varzar herself.

''We heard different rumors, but I do not believe she had an intention to do it herself,'' said Yelena Makhnin, who directs the local Business Improvement District. ''I heard people talking about the competition, but even if someone's a competitor, we have several restaurants on the boardwalk, and if you did it to your neighbor, you can't be sure you wouldn't be affected.''

The investigation is still open, but in the months since the fire, after conducting inspections and interviews, fire marshals have drawn one certain conclusion.

''The fire was deemed incendiary in nature, purposely set,'' said Michael Loughran, a spokesman for the Fire Department. No charges have been filed, and a spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, would not discuss the matter.

This leaves perhaps the worst sort of partial answer to a question about a fire: knowing that a place was burned on purpose but not who burned it. It gums up a person's oddsmaking, the ability to calculate how much to worry that the place might burn again.

To hear Ms. Varzar tell it, though, that description overstates the unknowns. She does not know exactly who burned her club, but she says she can describe them.

''I was here when it happened, and I do remember how it happened,'' Ms. Varzar said, sipping lightened coffee at a table under her green banners.

Ms. Varzar is described in the restaurant's promotional materials as a Russian beauty from Odessa. She lives near the boardwalk and is at the restaurant nearly every day. Her fingernails are painted white as typing paper and her hair is red. She wears tiny glasses on a loose string, and when she sits down to talk, she says that she is all ears.

She has a steely gaze, too, and if indeed someone was trying to scare her by setting fire to her restaurant, the effort failed. Enlisting the help of elected officials, civic boosters and others in the neighborhood who feel they owe her gratitude for enlivening the boardwalk, Ms. Varzar managed to reopen before the next beach season began. The city quickly replaced the damaged slats of boardwalk, she said, and she replaced the water-damaged carpets, ceilings and music gear.

''Everybody said it was competition, and this and this, but I don't believe it,'' she said. ''If somebody wants to put fire, they wouldn't have to do it under the boardwalk. You'd start it in the restaurant.''

This is all a long way of saying that she believes vagrants started the fire under the boardwalk, to keep warm or to cook -- who knows why vagrants under the boardwalk do the things they do? It is a widely accepted theory among Ms. Varzar's friends.

''That investigation should have been opened and shut in the same day,'' said State Senator Carl Kruger. ''The homeless people that live under the boardwalk were responsible for it, just as they were responsible for fires that did not rise to these proportions.''

The competing theories are bad for business in a neighborhood that already suffers from stereotypes of its immigrant population.

'''Law and Order' loves to peg us as the Russian mob,'' said Pat Singer, who founded the Brighton Neighborhood Association in 1977. ''We have all this negativity.''

This stretch of Brighton Beach remains a Russian enclave, but only to the extent that any place in Brooklyn can be defined so simply. There are stores with signs that say Kashtan Boutique, Saint-Petersburg and Café Euroasia. There is also a Starbucks where a counterwoman called Nancy specializes in passion fruit lemonades because, her sign says, they remind her of ''summer at the beach.''

The elevated trains clang over all of this on Brighton Beach Avenue, across tracks that filter sunlight into golden flecks of blinding sparkles onto the roadway below. And out on the boardwalk, there are no cars or trains, only the occasional patrols of the Fire Department and the lifeguards. Here, people move slowly with sandy toes and cigarettes and sunflower seeds, past bold green and gold banners, shiny and new.

Here was the scene of the fashion show last month during Russian Heritage Week; here was the place where Robert Varkonyi came to celebrate his dark horse victory in the 2002 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. Here, unsmiling ladies are portrayed in outsized new portraits on the ceilings and walls, and the golden rails are polished to a dull shine.

The owner, who blames vagrants for causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, has rebuilt, reopened and re-established her dominance on the boardwalk. She was asked whether she thinks the authorities will find those who burned her out.

''No,'' she mouthed, leaning in and smiling and exhaling the word without giving it breath. ''But I thank them for keeping this place safe.''

Photos: Tatiana Restaurant on the Brighton Beach boardwalk is thriving again, almost a year after a fire shot up from below and destroyed the popular establishment and fives stories of apartments. Tatiana Varzar, who immigrated from Russia in the 1970's, opened the restaurant in 1989. (Photographs by Nancy Siesel/The New York Times)